


Don't Stop Till You Get Enough

by BeautifulLife



Category: Saturday Night Fever (1977)
Genre: 1980s, Alternate Universe - Future, Future Fic, Gen, New York City
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 16:00:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17227046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeautifulLife/pseuds/BeautifulLife
Summary: Tony’s second job is teaching the hustle to the bored mamas and giggling teenage daughters of the Upper East Side. That one, he got by being spotted at Studio 54, where he wasn’t the star of the dance floor, not by a long shot—but he got noticed, he got hired, it’s a start.The events of STAYIN' ALIVE (the canonical sequel to SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER) were a dream. This is what really happened after Tony Manero moved to Manhattan to better himself.





	Don't Stop Till You Get Enough

**Author's Note:**

> TW: mild profanity and slurs (consistent with the movie, used for character development); references to sex, drugs, and AIDS epidemic (nothing graphic or detailed).

Tony’s first job is at the Tower Records in East Village, because he has the smile that sells 15 percent more tunes to bored mamas and giggling teenage daughters, coming down to the city from Albany for the day, risking a mugging to see college friends or have lunch at the Plaza.

Out-of-towners come in wanting Rod Stewart, Leo Sayer, and (shudder) Shaun Cassidy. Sell them that, but sell them the back catalog, too, or a New Wave up-and-comer playing CBGB’s, or some band from Norway that nobody else in the country has. Tony’s got a capacious memory for anything with a beat, and his staff discount means he can choreograph to songs nobody back in Bay Ridge has even heard.

Tony’s second job is teaching the hustle to the bored mamas and giggling teenage daughters of the Upper East Side. That one, he got by being spotted at Studio 54, where he wasn’t the star of the dance floor, not by a long shot—but he got noticed, he got hired, it’s a start.

The first time a woman his mother’s age, but silky and smooth with perfumed lotions and slippery lingerie, puts the moves on him, he feels like a stud.

The third time, he’s _sure_ he’s a stud.

The tenth time, sweaty and heart-pounding in the brutal heat of that New York City summer, he realizes if he was a girl, he’d call himself a cunt. When he asks Stephanie, later, if this is common, if this is normal, she laughs and supplies the word _gigolo._

She also points out that as his clients get blonder, his accent has retreated. He’s bettering himself.

One July night, when all the lights in the city go out, but the city doesn’t sleep—no, there’s light from fires and there are shots and screams—Tony betters his sound system and picks up a television and one of those new video cassette recorders, too. He doesn’t take it from Tower—that’d be cheating, that’d be wrong—and he tells himself everyone else is doing it, because they are.

He auditions.

He doesn’t get cast.

He learns about leotards and dance bags and capezios, and never to use the word _faggot_. He sits on the floor with little determined blonds of both sexes, every one of them the stars of their high schools, back in states with too many vowels.

And they talk. The kids from the states with vowels have a vocabulary of extensions and frames and turn-outs and some words that have just got to be menu items at the Frenchie restaurants where they work days, and they’re pulling his leg about those. Only it becomes obvious that they’ve got in their heads, all figured out with rules, things that he learned by feel and can’t explain.

So Tony takes dance classes.

The first class, he feels awkward and stupid, and showing off his moves—he’s a real dancer, he’s not a beginner, he knows where his hips are—gets glares from the instructor, a tiny man with a yipping voice like the dogs that Tony’s clients carry in their purses. He sticks with it mostly because there’s a redhead named Patricia, who he wants to make it with and hasn’t yet.

The fifth class, something clicks. _This_ kind of leg extension flows naturally into _that_ move. Hold your partner like _that_ , and every spin is reliably easy, but drop your shoulder half an inch, and it all falls apart. _These_ dances have the same tempo and can exchange steps if you want to impress the rubes who only know how to waltz and two-step—

Tony is in love.

He takes classes in every spare hour. He learns samba and salsa (who cares if they’re Spic dances—not everybody can do that roll to the hips), the fine points of three kinds of tango, basics of ballet, folk (easy), and jazz (he thinks the music is crap, but he can see how half the choreographers at little off-off-Broadway theaters want to be Bob Fosse).

He gets tapes for his jacked VCR and watches old musicals over and over. He’s not impressed with Gene Kelly’s hips, and the whole tap-dance craze of the 1930s strikes him as weird beyond belief, like something his mother would make up.

He lifts weights at a gym where he learns to politely say no to offers to make it with men that he knows not to call _faggots._ He can grasp that this makes him a stud—it’s not an insult, not when he’s trying to get that same shape to his arms, where it makes a clean line but he can lift and hurl partners around the stage.

In the spring, he’s cast in the chorus of an off-Broadway show called _Mango Tango._ He loves the rehearsals. He hates the rehearsals. People aren’t that different from back in Bay Ridge—they’re decent, they’re crap, they’re out for themselves, they share their bag of carrot sticks if you ran out of cash and don’t have lunch. There’s no room for improvisation in a show. It will be the same combinations over and over, always exactly the same, and he’s counting on the high from applause to make up for the tedium.

 _Mango Tango_ closes after seven performances.

He gets cast again, after that, though, often enough to quit his record-store job. He learns the smell of each theater along the edges of Times Square. He learns how to give a combination his full attention while learning it and how to stay focused but a little tuned-out on the hundredth repetition. He learns which chorus girls are up for casual encounters, which ones won’t make it with anyone who can’t get them a rung up the ladder, and which are hoping to retire as someone’s married sister.

His brother comes to every show at least once. So does Stephanie, with a different rising young ad executive on her arm each time. His parents never come at all.

Four years in, suddenly nobody wants disco dancing lessons. Tony hits the clubs, studying the new moves. Even with a hot chick to dance with—Jackie, his latest girlfriend, is flexible in ways he’d never guessed were possible—he feels like somebody’s uncle. Studio 54 vanished while he was busy dancing in choruses, and the new places all feel like someone else’s life.

He leaves the club scene with the foundation of a new dance curriculum, a raging cokehead hangover, and a renewed dream.

Tony wants lead roles, which means acting lessons.

He throws himself into acting the way he threw himself into dance lessons. There’s the month of bizarre accents, the month of sleeping in weird places to get himself into character, the month of impressions of famous people, the month of reading Shakespeare. He thinks about Stephanie’s advice to take a class or two at CUNY, tries one on Shakespeare, and lasts three weeks before getting bored with symbolism.

It’s the singing lessons that just about break him, though. Tony has a natural voice, which he warms up the way he does everything, obsessively and carefully. He doesn’t like _warbling._ There’s no epiphany of how everything works together like a well-oiled machine, the way there was with dance. There’s no thrill of being someone else, like there is with acting. It’s just fussing at his diaphragm—he’s got a good one, thanks to all those gym hours—and fussing at his breathing and fussing at whether you hit a note exactly or slide up to it with a little quaver and what to do about vibrato, and if dancing weren’t, in its own way, as dead-end a job as working in a paint store, he wouldn’t put up with this shit.

Tony’s work lands him a third-string speaking/singing role in a musical that’s mostly about cowboys. The role is so small that it has only one solo song, and the girl his character is paired with at the end doesn’t have a name.

“Cowboy music is the future,” his agent tells him. Tony’s not sure about agents, but dancers who want to move out of the chorus have them, and this one is a friend of a friend of someone Stephanie knows. “You need to think about changing your name. Nobody’s gonna cast an Eye-talian in a cowboy show.”

Tony thinks about it for a total of thirty-seven seconds before saying no. Sylvester Stallone’s been huge for years, and he didn’t make himself no _Sylvan Stallman_ or whatever bullshit agents want to dream up.

Tony's off-Broadway speaking part might be tiny, but it gets him his first fan letters, and he’s asked for an autograph while standing in line for groceries.

That year, one of his _gay_ (he’s learned this word is okay) friends in the chorus gets sick and dies. Then another, and another, until Tony feels queasy in the pit of his stomach if _anyone_ in the dance community or at the gym is missing for a couple days. It’s Stephanie, newly engaged to one of her ad executives, who tells him this isn’t a gay thing, it’s a sex thing, and it could happen to anyone.

Tony has had a lot of sex. He walks around Manhattan, terrified, for three days. He phones his brother. He writes a will. He dances all night at a renewed Studio 54, but goes home alone.

He gets tested.

He’s clean. He’s not slated to die horribly any time soon.

He finds himself kneeling in Our Lady of Sorrows, saying the most prayers he’s said since confirmation.

When a dancer in the chorus of his _next_ show—six lines, one solo, one duet, matched with girl whose character has a name and five lines—asks about steps Tony is showing off, between rehearsals, he finds himself starting a class to show dancers the latest popular club moves.

He goes to the clubs between shows and on dark nights, watching the dancers and trying the new moves. He teaches a new dance called the Moon Walk ( _not_ country, everything isn’t country yet), starting just a couple weeks before MTV makes it the hottest craze in the country. He buys condoms and stops going home alone.

He wears the same suit to Stephanie’s wedding that he wears to funeral after funeral, but with a brighter tie.

Parts are easier to get now, and Tony can’t _like_ it, not when dancers he admired, friends who crashed on his thrift-store sofa, compatriots he partied and worked out with, are _dead._ He was supposed to rise on merit, not climb the dead bodies of his competition. He can spend a whole day visiting dying friends now, telling them theater gossip, and he knows the reek of rotting flesh and sharp, sterile scent of hospitals as well as he knows the floor polish of theaters or the mingled perfumes and booze of the clubs.

His knees sometimes ache, in the coldest part of winter. He’s only twenty-five, but his body already wants him to know that it won’t do this forever.

He’s neither a success nor a failure. He gets fan mail, he has friends, he’s got a decent chance of getting a second lead any day now. He loves what he does, except when he’s bored stiff with dancing the same moves over and over.

He still gives private classes, and it’s one of the middle-aged ladies (bottle blonde, accent so far up her nose that she almost honks, wears only gray and diamonds) who suggests that he get a real estate license.

Manhattan is cleaner than when he came here, but property is still cheap and interest rates high. “This is the time to buy,” his student insists. “This is the time to make opportunities for yourself.”

So Tony sits all the way through the classes for a license, thinking how proud of him Stephanie would be, finally taking a class to better himself. He memorizes, he recites rules to himself, and he passes the exam on the first try. All those private classes—and _very_ private classes—give him a network of people who might want to buy apartments, and his smile hasn’t faded in seven years in Manhattan, so he does okay the first year, moderately well the second, and the third year, he has the money to start buying property himself.

When he turns thirty in 1988, his only starring role is in an off-off-off-Broadway production that ran seven weeks, but he owns three-quarters of the block he grew up on.

When he turns forty, he owns significant portions of Bay Ridge, two apartment towers in Manhattan, and a development in a trendy suburb of Washington, D.C. He’s funded an academy of dance at his old high school and his brother’s mission that serves AIDS patients. He still gives an occasional dance class, just for fun, but his fan mail now comes from MBA students, and he hires some bright young people to answer questions about business-school concepts he never learned.

Every one of Manero Enterprises’ hires comes from a working-class background, and if their names aren’t Italian, they’re Polish or Czech or Puerto Rican or, these days, Hmong. He hasn’t forgiven the thing about changing his name.

On New Year’s Eve in 1999, he toasts the new millenium with Stephanie (now divorced from her third husband and pursuing a successful career as a purveyor of lifestyle advice) on the balcony of his penthouse apartment and sketches out plans for a new theater that will provide a home for experimental productions based around popular dance. Two hundred guests do the Meat Stick, just for the hell of it, and Tony Manero’s still got hip moves that clear the dance floor.

**Author's Note:**

> I saw Saturday Night Fever for the first time on an all-night plane flight from San Francisco to New York, and I loved every minute of it -- especially the joyous, appraising look Tony would get every time he sized up a new dance move. When I looked up Stayin' Alive, it sounded like pure Sylvester Stallone wish-fulfillment. I wanted a more realistic story about how Tony survived in Manhattan during the doldrums of the late 1970s and maybe grew as a person.


End file.
